


He Came from the Void

by 20BirdBoy19



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Eventual Fluff, Found Family, Human Outsider (Dishonored), Multi, it's gonna get reeeall wholesome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:21:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29231457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/20BirdBoy19/pseuds/20BirdBoy19
Summary: A retelling of how the Outsider may have become human, and what ensues. I have only ever played Dishonored 1 and 2, and have extremely rudimentary knowledge of DotO, so this will be very un-canon.
Relationships: Corvo Attano & The Outsider, Corvo Attano/The Outsider (Dishonored), Emily Kaldwin/Wyman
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter One

The first thing he noticed was the immense weight of air pushing him down. It was painful. It was like all forces of the Earth were trying to squeeze the air out of his chest, crush him through the ground. He coughed weakly, sickly, not able to pull himself up. No thoughts passed through his head for a long time; that one singular physical sensation overwhelmed them all.

He struggled in and out of consciousness. He did not know this. His eyes conjured images of void darkness, of black skies and black air and the black notion of a floor revoked from being. He felt as if he should be floating through the dark nothingness, but something was wrong. Something was very wrong. 

A flash of something sharp stung his memory--he remembered hearing himself laughing, then screaming. 

He startled with a gasp, eyes springing open. The darkness that surrounded him did not change shape, but his body had slightly adapted slightly, and he felt able to circulate air through his nose and chest comfortably. Something cold was on his face. The floor. He placed a hand on it. Then another hand. Groaning, he raised himself up from where he laid, sprawled like a corpse. He grasped with tendrils of thought at the memory of laughter and screams, but it shied away from his conscious thought like a half-remembered intuition. 

After some time he had moved to standing. His legs shook and threatened to fail him, but he remained upright. He tried putting one of his feet in a direction away from himself, then following with the other. Walking put off his balance, so he ended up falling more than once. Each time, though, he would splay both of his hands on the cold ground, heave against the air, and end up on his feet and walking again. 

A sound came from somewhere in front of him. In the beginning, all he could hear was his pumping heart and the aching thump of a headache, but the more he walked the more he could hear he approached…something. It whispered and scratched and filled his mind with a tune discordant and beautiful, corrupt above all else. Yet it was the only thing, so he ambled towards it. 

Eventually he reached the sound. He stuck out his hand and waved it, catching, after a few moments, something hard and three pronged. His fingertips brushed the surface of it, and it filled him with a pain so extreme that he screamed. His voice caught on the syllable and ripped. The floor moved below him--or was it an ocean? It felt like undulating waves, rising and falling too fast and without rest--and he fell to it, clutching his arm and screaming. 

He didn’t hear footsteps sound nearer, or the click of a door or the voice booming from beyond it. He did not see the light illuminate the room, and didn’t feel the arms pick him up. A voice sounded from above him: “What the hell? How did you get in here! Who the hell _are_ \--oh. By the void...”

Eventually he lost consciousness again, and was plagued by the knife-thin edges of a foreboding, the memory of his own laughter and screams and something sharp on his flesh.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I had to edit the end of the first chapter so this would make sense.  
> Comment, critique, tell me who your favorite Dishonored character is!

Corvo groaned and turned on his side. His body ached, and his legs and arms throbbed dully with pain. He pushed a button on the wall beside his hospital bed and spoke into the receiver. “Olezka?”

A voice came through the receiver. “More elixir, Lord Protector?”

“That would be great.”

“Just one moment. I’ll be right there.”

Corvo took his finger from the button. Shortly later the physician, Olezka, came from a stairway in the corner of the room. He was stout, blonde-haired, polite, and always kept a neat appearance. He and Sokolov could not differ more. While Corvo watched him open a set of glass cabinet doors and take out a red vial, he idly wondered how Olezka’s office would compare to Sokolov’s. Not filled with as genius of inventions, maybe, but certainly much cleaner. 

Something on Olezka’s wrist began to flash violently. He set down the vial, looked at it for a moment, then turned to Corvo. “Medical emergency in the Empress’ quarters. It is not the Lady Emily, nor an assassin.” He paused. “The solution still has to settle for a few minutes until I can administer it to you. Is it alright if I…”

Corvo waved a hand. “That sounds much more important than the aches of an old man’s broken bones. Shoo.”

Olezka nodded, mumbled out some sort of apology, and sprinted out the doors. 

Corvo waited. It was all he could do. He tried to think critically about the situation, but the stinging pain in his legs and arms was coming more often. 

He looked out a window and watched smoke billow out of nearby chimneys, staining the air gray. The air pollution hadn’t gotten much better since the plague. Emily passed some whale oil restrictions for companies and industrial vehicles, but the technology was still prevalent in homes and businesses. The restrictions had been more of a symbol, anyway--an appeasement for those groups protesting whale killings. He had no opinion on this. His only concern was keeping the Empress safe.

A muffled sound from outside the hospital room’s door startled Corvo out of his thoughts. The sound, the screaming, grew louder and louder until it burst through the doors. A group of nurses and guards placed a screaming figure on a bed. Corvo sat up to get a better angle, but the figure, the man, was too far and moving around too much. He saw a nurse open a drawer with haste, take out a needle, carefully fill it. Another nurse unwrapped the man from some sort of drapery--was he _naked?_ \--and cleaned a site on his arm with disinfectant. Meanwhile, the guards quickly made their way to where Corvo was in bed, startled.

“We apologize for the disturbance, sir. Our highness Lady Emily is on her way now. She has requested a private audience with you, here, with the... uh… patient, given he seems to be the cause of this all.”

Corvo nodded, trying to see past them to the man on the hospital bed. “Who is he?”

The guards all looked at eachother and stammered. “We, ah, we aren’t sure of that, sir. We heard noises, entered the Empress’ chambers, and found her covering him with a blanket. Then we came here, on her orders.”

“And you’re sure he meant her no harm?”

“I--to be honest, sir, I don’t think he can even _stand_.”

By now the man was quiet. Corvo was about to ask another question, but he saw Emily enter the hospital room. She walked to the nurses, asked them something. One of them nodded, and they all left the room. Once they were on their way, she hurried over to the guards at the foot of Corvo’s bed. Only Corvo could tell how stressed she was--her poise was regal, her words steady and noble. 

“You followed orders perfectly, thank you.” She said. “Now please stand outside the entrance. I am in no danger here.” 

They assented, and left the three of them alone. Their footsteps gave echoing reverberations through the silence of the room as they walked, and the large white doors closed with a muffled thud. 

Emily waited a few seconds after that, staring at the shut doors. Her face sagged and paled. She sat down on the edge of Corvo’s bed and took his hand. She stared at his palm for a moment, searching for words. He turned it over to try and hold her hand, to try and comfort her, but the sight of the mark seemed to click something in her mind. She paused and looked away from him, over to the stranger on the bed. 

"That's the Outsider."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter isn't done yet, but I wanted to get it out because it's been a while since I added onto this fic  
> Edit: WOO finally done with the chapter! I'm also trying a different spacing than before because the previous chapters just kinda looked weird

The practitioners were no doubt itching to return to their patient, but Corvo himself doubted if it was necessary.

Emily had helped him into a wheeled chair and brought him to the Outsider. Corvo looked at his face, searched his unclothed body for marks of damage. There were none. None that were physical, at least. Or, possibly, none ever experienced by any previously living man.

On this bed there was not a man. This was the shade of a dead life, a power over the absence of being, the very essence of any divinity this world of soot and ash had spawned. Yet...yet the unthinkable.

When the Outsider would come to him in dreams, or appear like a vision from shrines draped in purple cloth, there was always a sense of surreality. If not for the Overseers and the mark on his hand, Corvo might very well have dismissed the instances as stress and trauma induced hallucinations.

But his head lay on a pillow, disrupting its natural buoyancy with the weight of his very tangible existence. The sheets about him were crumpled, his black hair in disarray. The imperfection of it all was too real to be dismissed. Corvo felt concerned for the Outsider, his...whatever they were, but to the same extent he felt a more overarching concern for matters he knew nothing of. What of the void? His powers had stopped working because the Outsider was out of it, that much was evident in his broken bones and stale, lifeless mark. Would a new face come to him in dreams? Would a new power bestow its will onto the world? Or had nay semblance of a higher power ceased to exist at all?

But that was all too much for the present. Corvo continued looking at the pale face, and asked, "what is he?"

"I...am not sure." Emily said, delicately taking an edge from the blanket and covering the Outsider some more as a response to a sudden shiver. "He isn't the same, though. Mentally, physically, spiritually, something is off besides his being here. He looked at me with fear I had never seen--and his eyes, look at them."

Corvo slightly raised an eyebrow, but complied. With the pads of his fingertips he lifted the Outsider's eyelids, and, even trying to keep no preconceptions, was startled by the green and black eyes beneath. For the most part his eyes retained the blank, endlessly void-dark absence of life as before (how was that slightly comforting?), but the irises were a pale green, back pupils flitting about in supposed dreams. He looked so innocent, lying there sound asleep with baby green eyes. It was deeply unsettling.

Emily spoke again. "I was in my chambers and heard a screaming coming from the closet, all of a sudden. I should have called the guards right away, I know, I know that's what you're going to say, but what if I had? What if they had seen his eyes?" She gesticulated to the Outsider, then put her palms in her lap. She looked uncomfortable all of a sudden. "Remember when I found the whale bone rune for you at the Hound Pits Pub? And then I saw _him_ in my dreams?"

Corvo nodded. He didn't like to think about how he had seen her writhing in nightmare on her bed, the things she had said and what she must have seen. He hadn't ever asked Emily about it, and she had never spoken about the nightmare. But he noticed, once they retook the tower and Emily slept in his room for a time out of fear of the world, that the dreams continued. They both kept to silence on the topic, and soon Emily moved to the Empress's chambers, and it didn't cross Corvo's mind again.

"Well I kept it for a while before I gave it to you. I put it under my pillow, but it gave me bad dreams.

"He scared me the first time. He showed me mother's death, and he asked me what I would do as Empress, if I would choose to get revenge on those who wronged me. I don't, he didn't..." she steepled her fingers, thinking out what she wanted to say next. "I think that he didn't mean to scare me. He didn't quite _get_ me, I think. Maybe he tried to treat me like he treated you. I don't know.

"Remember when we were on our way back to the tower, and the city brought the boat to take me here from the Lord Regent's lighthouse? I found another whale bone thing in a drawer in the room they put me in. It looked different, so I kept it. It made me feel stronger, more resolute, so I put it under my pillow to see what would happen."

As the story pulled Emily along, the words spilled from her mouth almost before her lips could form them. Corvo could tell that she had wanted to tell him this story for a long time. He let her continue. There was no benefit to stopping her. The only other person they could speak to on the matter was currently passed out, and neither him nor Emily had any more pressing matters to attend to than this. He let her tell the story the way it came to her, not cutting short her long-winded speech. 

"I had some nightmares with that one, too," she added. "But I needed the strength it gave me--Callista taught well, but being an Empress was still too much at once. Sleeping with the charm made me feel so much better. 

" _He_ didn't come every night, either, so I wasn't too frightened to keep it. And, anyway, I got used to his company. After a bit, I would say we became friends, or something like it."

Here Emily hesitated, and Corvo could tell there was something that she was leaving out of the story deliberately. Still, he did not push, and let her continue as she wished. 

"A while later I stopped seeing him in my dreams, so I stopped sleeping with the charm. I collected them, though, as mementos, and put them in the secret room in my closet."

Corvo didn't respond. She filled the silence, unsure what his reticence meant. "Don't be angry with me. I know you have a connection with him, too! I know you keep the whale bones with your mask."

"Calm down." His voice was tired. The line between Lord Protector and Father was blurring, and Corvo didn't know whether to shun the Outsider from all of Gristol for being the reason his daughter kept secrets from him, or shun him for being a possible threat to his Empress. Both options, he knew, were misguided. Whatever the Outsider was, he was no enemy, and did not stir unnecessary chaos. Corvo's uneasiness sprung from somewhere else, but he could not think of where. 

Emily, meanwhile, was fuming at his response. Even with the stature of nobility and the graceful attire of an Empress, sometimes the petulant side of her sixteen years on the world did emerge. "Corvo, I don't need to calm down! You know I am correct! You hide your hand and don't talk about him, but I _know_ he has to do with how you rescued me! I understood even then! Don't treat me--"

"No, no, no." He held up a hand, weakly. A placating gesture. "Just, quieter. I'm not angry, I trust you."

Emily quieted and waited for him to say more. Corvo leaned back into his wheelchair with a huff. He looked at the Outsider's slack face and tried to sort his thoughts. Suddenly, a piercing pain shot through his skull, and he grabbed his head into his hands. Another headache, _now_? He groaned in pain, pointed blindly at where Olezka had left the elixir. But before Emily could even get up to recive it, he was already deep out of conciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment, critique, anything is welcome! :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I am so very bad at writing this consistently, I'm just going to post now what i h a v e written. So as of now, this chapter is unfinished.
> 
> Also, important question that I cannot find ANY information on: how old roughly would Kirin Jindosh be when Emily is 16?

By some intuitive leap, Corvo knew he was in the Void. There were no sins to point to that conclusion; there were no fractures of Dunwall floating about him, nor the melancholy wail of whalesong, and the Outsider had yet to appear in this realm, if he would at all. 

His view was suspended in the corner of a ceiling where two blank gray walls met. The room was a squarish shape, absolutely devoid of any indicating features except for a rectangular doorway that descended into blackness once it crossed the threshold of the walls. It was ambiently lit, with no obvious light source. Corvo could not discern whether the Void was providing light, or if a strange glow emanated from the walls. 

He was stuck, unable to move or even blink. Corvo waited for something about the scene to change--the light to flicker, a presence to come from the doorway. His tension grew with each passing second. When at last he opened his eyes, startled into wakefulness by sunlight shining directly onto his face through the windows, he felt sick with a gnawing anxiety from it all.  _ Something  _ should have happened in that room. Otherwise, why would the Void take him there and force him to stare at it, restrained from movement? Either he missed an event or clue in the room, or something within the Void was very wrong. Based on recent events, he assumed the latter was more likely. 


End file.
